With the launch of the YouTube Reporting API last year, we introduced a mechanism to download raw YouTube Analytics data. It generates a set of predefined reports in the form of CSV files that contain YouTube Analytics data for content owners. Once activated, reports are generated regularly, and each one contains data for a unique, 24-hour period. We heard that you also wanted more data to be accessible via the YouTube Reporting API service.

These new reports are generated automatically for eligible YouTube Partners. Thus, if you are an eligible YouTube partner, you don't even need to create reporting jobs. Just follow the instructions below to find out whether the reports are available to you and to download the reports themselves.

We also want to let you know that more reports will be available via the YouTube Reporting API service in the coming weeks and months. Please keep an eye on the revision history to find out when additional reports become available.

Call the jobs.list method with the includeSystemManaged parameter set to true. This will return a list of the available reporting jobs. All jobs with the systemManaged property set to true are jobs for the new report types.

If you develop a tool, script, plugin, or any other code that uploads video to YouTube, we have an important update for you! On October 31, 2016, we’ll be shutting down the ability to upload videos through the old YouTube Data API (v2) service. This shutdown is in accordance with our prior deprecation announcements for the YouTube Data API (v2) service in 2014 and ClientLogin authentication in 2013.

If you’re using this service, unless changes are made to your API Client(s), your users will no longer be able to upload videos using your integration starting October 31, 2016.

We announced this deprecation over two years ago to give our developer community time to adjust. If you haven’t already updated, please update your integration as soon as possible. The supported method for programmatically uploading videos to YouTube is the YouTube Data API v3 service, with OAuth2 for authentication.

Did you already update your integration to use the YouTube Data API v3 service and OAuth2? It’s possible there are users who may still be on old versions of your software. You may want to reach out to your users and let them know about this. We may also reach out to YouTube creators who are using these old versions and let them know about this as well.

If you have questions about this shutdown or about the YouTube Data API v3 service, please post them to our Stack Overflow tag. You can also send us a tweet at @YouTubeDev, and follow us for the latest updates.

Today we are announcing changes to the YouTube API Services Terms of Service and introducing new Developer Policies to guide their implementation. These updated Terms of Service and new Developer Policies will take effect in six months so that you have time to understand and implement them.

The YouTube API Services Terms of Service are developers’ rules of the road, and like any rules of the road, they need to be updated over time as usage evolves. As we've grown, so has an entire ecosystem of companies that support users, creators and advertisers, many of them built on top of YouTube’s API Services. We haven’t had major updates to our API Services Terms of Service in over four years, so during the past several months we've been speaking to developers and studying how our API Services are being used to make sure that our terms make sense for the YouTube of today. We updated the YouTube API Services Terms of Service to keep up with usage growth, strengthen user controls and protections even further, and address misuse. You can find the updated terms here.

In order to provide more guidance to developers, which has been a key ask, we are introducing new Developer Policies. They aim to provide operational guidelines for accessing and using our API Services, covering user privacy and data protection, data storage, interface changes, uploads, comments, and more. You can read the full Developer Policies here.

In addition to the new terms, we're also announcing the upcoming YouTube’s Measurement Program. This new certification program will help participants provide accurate, consistent, and relevant YouTube measurement data to their clients and users, thereby helping them make informed decisions about YouTube. We’ll launch the program with a few initial partners before scaling it more broadly. Please visit the YouTube’s Measurement Program website to learn more.

We developed these updates with a few core principles in mind:

Improving the YouTube experience for users and creators. Every month, we update our app and site with dozens of new features for users and creators. We want to make sure that every application or website takes advantage of the latest and greatest YouTube functionalities. That’s why we’re introducing a Requirement of Minimum Functionality, which is designed to ensure users have a set of basic functionality around core parts of their YouTube experience, like video playback, comment management, video upload, and other services.

Strengthening user data and privacy. We want to help foster innovative products while giving users even more control around data privacy and security. These updated terms serve to strengthen our existing user controls and protections even further. For example, we now require developers to have a privacy policy that clearly explains to users what user info is accessed, collected and stored.

Fostering a healthy YouTube ecosystem. While we want to continue to encourage growth of our ecosystem, we also need to make sure our terms limit misuse. As the YouTube developer ecosystem evolved, we saw some fantastic uses of our API Services. Sadly, with amazing uses, there have also been a handful of applications that have misused our API Services. These updated terms serve to further protect against misuse and protect users, creators, and advertisers.

It's been great to see all the ways developer websites and applications have integrated with YouTube. We are committed to the YouTube API Services and we continue to invest with new features that will improve the product, such as expanding the Reporting API service with Payment reports, and Custom reports, launching later this year.

While we understand these updated terms and new policies may require some adjustment by developers, we believe they’ll help ensure our ecosystem remains strong and poised for growth. Again, to ensure developers have sufficient time to understand and adapt to these changes, the updated YouTube API Services Terms of Service and the new Developer Policies will take effect six months from now, on February 10, 2017. Please do take the time to read and become familiar with them. If you have any questions please get in touch with us via yt-api-tos-questions@google.com.Posted by Shalini GovilPai, Global Head of Technology Solutions

Today we added YouTube to Google's HTTPS transparency report. We're proud to announce that in the last two years, we steadily rolled out encryption using HTTPS to 97 percent of YouTube's traffic.

HTTPS provides critical security and data integrity for the web and for all web users. So what took us so long? As we gradually moved YouTube to HTTPS, we faced several unique challenges:

Lots of traffic! Our CDN, the Google Global Cache, serves a massive amount of video, and migrating it all to HTTPS is no small feat. Luckily, hardware acceleration for AES is widespread, so we were able to encrypt virtually all video serving without adding machines. (Yes, HTTPS is fast now.)

Lots of devices! You watch YouTube videos on everything from flip phones to smart TVs. We A/B tested HTTPS on every device to ensure that users would not be negatively impacted. We found that HTTPS improved quality of experience on most clients: by ensuring content integrity, we virtually eliminated many types of streaming errors.

Lots of requests! Mixed content—any insecure request made in a secure context—poses a challenge for any large website or app. We get an alert when an insecure request is made from any of our clients and will block all mixed content using Content Security Policy on the web, App Transport Security on iOS, and uses CleartextTraffic on Android. Ads on YouTube have used HTTPS since 2014.

We're also proud to be using HTTP Secure Transport Security (HSTS) on youtube.com to cut down on HTTP to HTTPS redirects. This improves both security and latency for end users. Our HSTS lifetime is one year, and we hope to preload this soon in web browsers.

97 percent is pretty good, but why isn't YouTube at 100 percent? In short, some devices do not fully support modern HTTPS. Over time, to keep YouTube users as safe as possible, we will gradually phase out insecure connections.

In the real world, we know that any non-secure HTTP traffic could be vulnerable to attackers. All websites and apps should be protected with HTTPS — if you’re a developer that hasn’t yet migrated, get started today.

At YouTube we care about the quality of the pixels we deliver to our users. With many millions of devices uploading to our servers every day, the content variability is so huge that delivering an acceptable audio and video quality in all playbacks is a considerable challenge. Nevertheless, our goal has been to continuously improve quality by reducing the amount of compression artifacts that our users see on each playback. While we could do this by increasing the bitrate for every file we create, that would quite easily exceed the capacity of many of the network connections available to you. Another approach is to optimize the parameters of our video processing algorithms to meet bitrate budgets and minimum quality standards. While Google’s compute and storage resources are huge, they are finite and so we must temper our algorithms to also fit within compute requirements. The hard problem then is to adapt our pipeline to create the best quality output for each clip you upload to us, within constraints of quality, bitrate and compute cycles.

This is a well known triad in the world of video compression and transcoding. The problem is usually solved by finding a sweet spot of transcoding parameters that seem to work well on average for a large number of clips. That sweet spot is sometimes found by trying every possible set of parameters until one is found that satisfies all the constraints. Recently, others have been using this “exhaustive search” idea to tune parameters on a per clip basis.

What we’d like to show you in this blog post is a new technology we have developed that adapts our parameter set for each clip automatically using Machine Learning. We’ve been using this over the last year for improving the quality of movies you see on YouTube and Google Play.

The good and bad about parallel processing

We ingest more than 400 hours of video per minute. Each file must be transcoded from the uploaded video format into a number of other video formats with different codecs so we can support playback on any device you might have. The only way we can keep up with that rate of ingest and quickly show you your transcoded video in YouTube is to break each file in pieces called “chunks,” and process these in parallel. Every chunk is processed independently and simultaneously by CPUs in our Google cloud infrastructure. The complexity involved in chunking and recombining the transcoded segments is significant. Quite aside from the mechanics of assembling the processed chunks, maintaining the quality of the video in each chunk is a challenge. This is because to have as speedy a pipeline as possible, our chunks don’t overlap, and are also very small; just a few seconds. So the good thing about parallel processing is increased speed and reduced latency. But the bad thing is that without the information about the video in the neighboring chunks, it’s now difficult to control chunk quality so that there is no visible difference between the chunks when we tape them back together. Small chunks don’t give the encoder much time to settle into a stable state hence each encoder treats each chunk slightly differently.

Smart parallel processing

You could say that we are shooting ourselves in the foot before starting the race. Clearly, if we communicate information about chunk complexity between the chunks, each encoder can adapt to what’s happening in the chunks after or before it. But inter-process communication increases overall system complexity and requires some extra iterations in processing each chunk.

Actually, OK, truth is we’re stubborn here in Engineering and we wondered how far we could push this idea of “don’t let the chunks talk to each other.”

The plot below shows an example of the PSNR in dB per frame over two chunks from a 720p video clip, using H.264 as the codec. A higher value of PSNR means better picture quality and a lower value means poorer quality. You can see that one problem is the quality at the start of a chunk is very different from that at the end of the chunk. Aside from the average quality level being worse than we would like, this variability in quality causes an annoying pulsing artifact.

Because of small chunk sizes, we would expect that each chunk behaves like the previous and next one, at least statistically. So we might expect the encoding process to converge to roughly the same result across consecutive chunks. While this is true much of the time, it is not true in this case. One immediate solution is to change the chunk boundaries so that they align with high activity video behavior like fast motion, or a scene cut. Then we would expect that each chunk is relatively homogenous so the encoding result should be more uniform. It turns out that this does improve the situation, but not as much as we’d like, and the instability is still often there.

The key is to allow the encoder to process each chunk multiple times, learning on each iteration how to adjust its parameters in anticipation of what happens in across the entire chunk instead of just a small part of it. This results in the start and end of each chunk having similar quality, and because the chunks are short, it is now more likely that the differences across chunk boundaries are also reduced. But even then, we noticed that it can take quite a number of iterations for this to happen. We observed that the number of iterations is affected a great deal by the quantization related parameter (CRF) of the encoder on that first iteration. Even better, there is often a “best” CRF that allows us to hit our target bitrate at a desired quality with just one iteration. But this “best” setting is actually different for every clip. That’s the tricky bit. If only we could work out what that setting was for each clip, then we’d have a simple way of generating good looking clips without chunking artifacts.

The plot on the right shows the result of many experiments with our encoder at varying CRF (constant quality) settings, over the same 1080p clip. After each experiment we measured the bitrate of the output file and each point shows the CRF, bitrate pair for that experiment. There is a clear relationship between these two values. In fact it is very well modeled as an exponential fit with three parameters, and the plot shows just how good that modeled line is in fitting the observed data points. If we knew the parameters of the line for our clip, then we’d see that to create a 5 Mbps version of this clip (for example) we’d need a CRF of about 20.

Pinky and the Brain

What we needed was a way to predict our three curve fitting parameters from low complexity measurements about the video clip. This is a classic problem in machine learning, statistics and signal processing. The gory mathematical details of our solution are in technical papers that we published recently.1 You can see there how our thoughts evolved. Anyway, the idea is rather simple: predict the three parameters given things we know about the input video clip, and read off the CRF we need. This prediction is where the “Google Brain” comes in.

The “things we know about the input video clip” are called video “features.” In our case there are a vector of features containing measurements like input bit rate, motion vector bits in the input file, resolution of the video and frame rate. These measurements can also be made from a very fast low quality transcode of the input clip to make them more informative. However, the exact relationship between the features and the curve parameters for each clip is rather more complicated than an equation we could write down. So instead of trying to discover that explicitly ourselves, we turned to Machine Learning with Google Brain. We first took about 10,000 video clips and exhaustively tested every quality setting on each, measuring the resulting bitrate from each setting. This gave us 10,000 curves which in turn gave us 4 x 10,000 parameters measured from those curves.

The next step was to extract features from our video clips. Having generated the training data and the feature set, our Machine Learning system learned a “Brain” configuration that could predict the parameters from the features. Actually we used both a simple “regression” technique as well as the Brain. Both outperformed our existing strategy. Although the process of training the Brain is relatively computationally heavy, the resulting system was actually quite simple and required only a few operations on our features. That meant that the compute load in production was small.

Does it work?

The plot on the right shows the performance of the various systems on 10,000 video clips. Each point (x,y) represents the percentage of clips (y-axis) in which the resulting bitrate after compression is within x% of the target bitrate. The blue line shows the best case scenario where we use exhaustive search to get the perfect CRF for each clip. Any system that gets close to that is a good one. As you can see at the 20% rate, our old system (green line) would hit the target bitrate 15% of the time. Now with our fancy Brain system we can hit it 65% of the time if we use features from your upload only (red line), and better than 80% of the time (dashed line) using some features from a very fast low quality transcode.

But does this actually look good? You may have noticed that we concentrated on our ability to hit a particular bitrate rather than specifically addressing picture quality. Our analysis of the problem showed that this was the root cause. Pictures are the proof of the pudding and you can see some frames from a 720p video clip below (shot from a racing car). The top row shows two frames at the start and end of a typical chunk and you can see that the quality in the first frame is way worse than the last. The bottom row shows the frames in the same chunk using our new automated clip adaptive system. In both cases the measured bitrate is the same at 2.8 Mbps. As you can see, the first frame is much improved and as a bonus the last frame looks better as well. So the temporal fluctuation in quality is gone and we also managed to improve the clip quality overall.

This concept has been used in production in our video infrastructure division for about a year. We are delighted to report it has helped us deliver very good quality streams for movies like "Titanic" and most recently "Spectre." We don’t expect anyone to notice, because they don’t know what it would look like otherwise.

YouTube creators rely on data -- data about how their channel is performing, data about their video’s ratings, their earnings. Lots of data. That’s why we launched the YouTube Reporting API back in October, which helps you bulk up your data requests while keeping them on a low-quota diet.

Reports made with the API started from the day you scheduled them, going forward. Now that it’s been in the wild, we’ve heard another request loud and clear: you don’t just want current data, you want older data, too. We’re happy to announce that the Reporting API now delivers historical data covering 180 days prior to when the reporting job is first scheduled (or July 1st, 2015, whichever is later.)

Developers with a keen eye may have already noticed this, as it launched a few weeks ago! Just in case you didn’t, you can find more information on how historical data works by checking out the Historical Data section of the Reporting API docs.

(Hint: if you’ve already got some jobs scheduled, you don’t need to do anything! We’ll generate the data automatically.)

New to the Reporting API? Tantalized by the possibility of all that historical data? Our documentation explains everything you need to know about scheduling jobs and the types of reports available. Try it out with our API Explorer, then dive into the sample code or write your own with one of our client libraries.

More than half of YouTube watch time happens on mobile devices, with a large and rapidly increasing fraction of this time spent on cellular networks. At the same time, it is common for users to have mobile data plans with usage limits. Users who exhaust their quota can incur overage charges, have their data connections turned off and speeds reduced. When this happens, application performance suffers and user satisfaction decreases.

At the root of this problem lies the fact that users do not have an easy manner to share data plan information with an application, and, in turn, applications cannot optimize the user’s experience. In an effort to address this limitation we have worked with a few partners in the mobile ecosystem to specify an API that improves data transparency.

At a high level, the API comprises two parts. First, a mechanism for applications to establish an anonymous identifier of the user’s data plan. This new, Carrier Plan Identifier (CPID), protects the user’s identity and privacy. Second, a mechanism that allows applications, after establishing a CPID, to request information about the user’s data plan from the mobile network operator (MNO). Applications communicate with MNOs using HTTPS and the API encodes data plan information in an extensible JSON-based format.

We believe the API will improve transparency and Quality of Experience (QoE) for mobile applications such as YouTube. For example, the cost of data can depend on the time of day, where users get discounts for using the network during off-peak hours. For another example consider that while users with unlimited data plans may prefer high resolution videos, users who are about to exceed their data caps or are in a busy network may be better served by reduced data rate streams that extend the life of the data plan while still providing good quality.

Cellular network constraints are even more acute in countries where the cost of data is high, users have small data budgets, and networks are overutilized. With more than 80% of views from outside the United States, YouTube is the first Google application conducting field trials of the Mobile Data Plan API in countries, such as Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Guatemala, where these characteristics are more prominent. These trials aim to bring data plan information as an additional real-time input to YouTube’s decision engine tuned to improve QoE.

We believe the same data plan information will lay the foundation for other applications and mobile operators to innovate together. This collaboration can make data usage more transparent to users, incentivize efficient use of mobile networks, and optimize user experience.

We designed the API in cooperation with a number of key partners in the mobile ecosystem, including Telenor Group, Globe Telecom and Tigo, all of which have already adopted and implemented this API. Google also worked with Ericsson to support the Mobile Data Plan API in their OTT Cloud Connect platform. We invite other operators and equipment vendors to implement this solution and offer applicable products and services to their customers.

The Mobile Data Plan API specification is available from this link. We are looking forward to your comments and we are available at: [data-plan-api@google.com].